Thank you for reading. Thank you for your interest.

Most entries on this website—originally, a blog in the style of early 2000s, an indulgence in amateur criticism and travel writing—have been scrubbed. Their contents have occasionally been recycled into other pieces of writing; unless they can serve the same purpose, the rest will probably remain locked away (I have left a few of the tamer entries below). But the address remains, and so, with the idea that anyone typing my name into a search engine might arrive here, I will introduce myself.

My name is Dylan Levi King. I'm a writer and translator.

Since 2015, I have been based in Tokyo. It is an inexpensive, frictionless place to live. In the ten years prior, I moved every six months average, with relatively longterm stays in Guangzhou and Vancouver.

I translate from Chinese to English. As a translator, most of my work is invisible. The better the compensation, the less likely it is than my name is attached. On that side of things, I have worked on CEO autobiographies, works of political theory, a volume on modern monetary theory, and consulted on localization. On the other side—meager compensation and meticulous crediting of the translator—there is literary fiction. My most recent projects have been Vessel, a memoir by Cai Chongda (HarperCollins 2021), Shaanxi Opera, a forthcoming translation with Nicky Harman of Jia Pingwa's late-career masterwork (Amazon, 2023), and Mai Jia's The Colonel and the Eunuch (it has a publisher and a date with the press in early 2023, but nothing has been formally announced).

I write mostly on East Asian culture and politics. Recent pieces include an obituary for an itinerant blind musician in Inner Mongolia, speculation on North Korean environmentalism, and a review of a novel by a young writer from the Northeast.

Another page has a more detailed list of publications.

My interests, by which I mean targets of curiosity but also areas of not insignificant knowledge or experience, are 1980s to present Chinese cultural politics, Chinese drug policy and the illicit drug market, organized crime in East Asia, applications of cybernetics and systems theory, radical online politics (right wing populism, left Maoism, whatever else), Japanese elite politics, Southeast Asian borderlands, potash, small arms development, Japanese radical cinema, and fashion.

The rest is trivia.

Please email me.